


Can't Find My Way Home

by of_dreamdust



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Human Castiel, Human!Castiel - Freeform, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Mentions of alcohol, Smoking, i don't even know what this is, implied alcoholism, mentions of depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-08
Updated: 2014-11-08
Packaged: 2018-02-24 15:15:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2586119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/of_dreamdust/pseuds/of_dreamdust
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam finds him in the kitchen, sitting at the table and smoking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Can't Find My Way Home

Sam finds him in the kitchen, sitting at the table and smoking.  
“Hey,” he says quietly, but doesn’t comment on the cigarette between his fingers. “I brought you stuff.” He puts the bag on the table in front of him, but Dean still wouldn’t look at him. He just nods his head and inhales another smoke.  
“Jody said you’re gonna starve yourself if I don’t do something about it. I don’t even know what’s in the bag, honestly. I think there’s some bread, maybe cereal. I think I saw pie.”  
No alcohol, though. Sam doesn’t say it out loud.  
Dean scratches the back of his neck and nods again. “Thanks,” he manages after another smoke.  
“Sure thing,” Sam says. He slowly looks around the room and notices the mess.  
There are ashtrays all over the kitchen; one is on the table in front of him. All of them are full. There are ashes on the table, too. Bread crumbs all over the sink, and tons of dirty dishes; mostly cups and just a few plates. And plenty of old newspapers.  
“The front door wasn’t locked,” Sam comments, remembering the mess he found in the living room too. Dirty old blanket thrown on the couch, scattered books, and loud noises of TV, before Sam reached and turned it off.  
Dean nods again, and rubs his temples, ashes from the cigarette falling into his hair. Which is unwashed, Sam notices.  
“I forgot,” Dean murmurs. His voice is hoarse and tired. He draws another smoke.  
“How are you, Dean?” Sam asks, taking a seat opposite of him.  
Dean throws the butt of the cigarette in the closest ashtray, and immediately finds another one somewhere in his pocket. “I broke the radio,” he comments, pulling a red lighter from under the newspapers. “I was making a coffee and I don’t know what I did, but the damn thing fell from the fridge and flew into pieces.” He draws smoke again. “I tried to fix it. Stick it all back together, but it wouldn’t work.” He shrugs. “It was broken anyway. Before, I mean. You could’ve listened to just this one station. Jazz, or something like that. And you do just as much as breathe in its direction and it goes straight to static.” He scratches his head again, and sits more squarely. “But Cas wouldn’t let me throw it away. He liked the damn thing so much. ‘It still works,’ he would say. ‘I don’t need a new one, Dean.’”  
Sam just watches him carefully. He watches the dark circles under his brother’s eyes, and the way his hands are still trembling. He notices that his nails are bitten, which Dean never did before. When Sam was biting his nails back in high school, Dean would always smack him. And here he is now, with nails so bitten that the skin around them is red. And two of his fingers are yellow from smoking. Sam wonders just how much he smoked in the last couple of weeks when he got to this point.  
But he doesn’t comment on that either.  
“You want me to get you mine?” Sam asks instead. “I don’t use it anyway.”  
Dean just shakes his head.  
“Is this how it feels?” he asks abruptly. “Is this how you felt when Jess died?” he says, raising his head to look at his brother for the first time.  
Sam swallows. Dean’s eyes are red and swollen.  
“I’m not sure, Dean,” he answers honestly. “When Jess died I was… I was angry. I was… furious. I just wanted to find the thing that killed her, and get my revenge. And it hurt.” Sam looks away now. “It still does, sometimes. I never thought it was literal, you know. I always though it’s just an expression, thing people say to explain how they feel. I never thought it would be literal, physical pain. But that’s how it felt.  
“It felt like someone stabbed a knife through my lungs, and most of the time I wished it was true. I thought that would be easier to bear.” He laughs sadly, not looking away from his hands. “There were times then I thought about doing that myself.  
I thought how it would never be the same. And it isn’t really; it’ll never be. But I got through it, eventually. I mean… Both of us know I had this… really hard period. But I survived.”  
He raises his head to look at his brother. And Dean is faced toward him, but he isn’t seeing him; he’s looking straight through Sam, like he isn’t there at all.  
“Dean,” Sam says gently, trying to snap him back. “It was different for me, you know? She was taken from me in a second. I didn’t expect it. I didn’t… I didn’t have time to deal with it properly.”  
Dean blinks, and for a moment he focuses back on Sam. Then he looks away. “There’s never enough time, Sam,” he says.  
He throws away the cigarette, which has burned down to the filter, and takes another one. He lights it and draws a smoke almost automatically.  
“I still didn’t enter the library”, Dean says after a few quiet moments. “I wanted to, but I couldn’t. I keep thinking, what if I mess something up, you know? Cas never let me mess with his books. He would say I never return them on their places. ‘You can’t just leave them anywhere,’ he would say. But I could never remember what their exact place was. And he always kept them in order. He would scribble all over them, and get their pages all smudged, sure, but he would always keep them on their places.” He draws one more smoke before he continues. “I should return his Hobbit back on the shelf, but I don’t know where his exact spot is. And I worry I’ll mess everything up.”  
Sam looks at him and doesn’t know what to say. What is he supposed to say, anyway?  
“I sleep in the living room”, Dean says to save him trouble. He points to the couch with a cigarette. “I tried to go back to our room, but it’s empty. His stuff are still everywhere, but when I lie down and try to sleep I can’t hear his breathing.  
And it’s so cold, Sam. I have all the blankets for myself, but it so cold. So I come in the living room and turn his damn radio on. But it doesn’t really help. It’s still so quiet.” He puts the cigarette between his lips, and rubs his forehead. “And now I broke the stupid thing. And I don’t know what to do now.”  
And neither does Sam. He’s glad Dean’s finally talking; after he came back from the hospital, Dean just rushed through the house, preparing everything for the funeral like it’s just another thing that needs to be done, along with painting the kitchen and fixing that board that keeps creaking.  
“We get him cremated, but we do it properly,” Dean said, and there was no room for discussion.  
And after that, he just kept quiet. He just wanted to be alone; Sam understood that, so he let him for a while. But he would still drop by every now and then, bring him food or something, and Dean would always stay quiet; he would just thank him, with rough voice and swollen eyes. And no matter how much it had hurt to see his brother break down completely, shaking and screaming and sobbing, it hurt even more to see him that empty.  
Sam worried. He still does. He worries that, if he isn’t careful, if he pushes Dean too hard – or not hard enough – he will lose him too. So at least this is some progress.  
“I miss him,” Dean says quietly. “I didn’t… I didn’t know it would be this empty. I expected the pain, and I expected fear, but I didn’t expect emptiness. And that’s the worst part.”  
And Sam knows that, too. He knows how it is to feel lost and empty, and crippled, like a part of you is missing.  
In a way, it is missing.  
But Sam doesn’t say it out loud.  
“I keep thinking he’ll come back, y’know?” Dean continues. “I still have this feeling that he just… That he just flew away on one more of his mission, and he’ll be back any second now.  
I used to think that’s the worst thing that could happen. I used to pray that he just doesn’t leave me like that. That’s why all these shits happened.”  
Sam waves his head. “You can’t blame yourself, Dean.”  
“Damn right I can, Sam. Because it is my fault.”  
“Dean, these things happen,” Sam says slowly, leaning forward. “It’s the part of being human.”  
Dean slams his fist on the table. “He wouldn’t be human if it wasn’t for me! If it wasn’t for me he would still -” He stops abruptly. He throws the cigarette away, and gets up from the table. His hands are shaking again.  
He leans on the counter, his back to Sam.  
“Dean,” his brother says gently. “Do you really think you could have done anything when he decided to stay? Damn it, Dean, you know much better how stubborn he… was.”  
And this is the part you never get used to. The part when everything you describe is in the past. He was stubborn. He made his decision. But he won’t anymore.  
“I could have tried”, Dean presses through his teeth.  
“You did,” Sam says, standing up. “You did enough.” And he just stands there, and feels stupid. He doesn’t know what to do.  
“He always made coffee,” Dean says after a moment. He’s clenching one of the cups, still turned away from Sam. “It would be the first thing he’d do in the morning. And he would curl in the blanket and read. Always grumpy, but always up so early.” He lets his head fall down to his chest. “I miss him so much. I don’t know what to do.”  
Sam puts a hand on his brother’s shoulder, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t even flinch.  
“What am I supposed to do now, Sam?” he asks instead, in a quiet voice.  
“I don’t know, Dean,” Sam says honestly, because he misses him too, and he misses his brother how he used to be, and he misses how they used to be together, but it’s all gone now, and there’s no turning back, there’s no fixing it. Not anymore.  
“I don’t know,” he repeats and lets the silence fall over him too.

**Author's Note:**

> I really don't know what this is. I'm just sad, and this came up.


End file.
